So what do you do if you worry that your vote just won’t count for enough? Obviously, you vote twice! There are 44,000 people who could do just that in both Maryland and Virginia. At this point, Maryland is being sued for allowing people who are not legally residents to vote in elections. Watchdog.org makes the following allegations.

An election-watch group is suing Maryland over the alleged presence of noncitizens on the state’s voting rolls. The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, asserts that individuals who opted out of jury duty because they were not legal U.S. residents have cast ballots in at least three Maryland elections. Based on the number of potential unqualified voters identified in Frederick County, up to 7 percent** of Maryland’s registered voters could be illegal immigrants, according to estimates.

According to Thom Tillis and Phil Berger, the 2012 Election in North Carolina was no picnic either. Details of the voter error and fraud discovered by the North Carolina Board of Elections follows below.

765 voters with an exact match of first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in N.C. and the other state in the 2012 general election.
35,750 voters with the same first and last name and DOB were registered in N.C. and another state and voted in both states in the 2012 general election.
155,692 voters with the same first and last name, DOB and last four digits of SSN were registered in N.C. and another state – and the latest date of registration or voter activity did not take place within N.C.
13,416 deceased voters on the voter rolls in October 2013.
81 deceased voters that had voter activity* after they died.

So all of this suggests that RS Front-Page Contributor Dan McLaughlin may have discovered a “margin for fraud” when he reported that Democratic candidates won 74% of the statewide races with a popular margin of less than 1%. When the margin expands to between 1% and 2%, the Democrats and Republicans split the close ones about 50-50. He doesn’t specifically state this as an unequivocal claim, and his data suggests that we’re talking about far less than 7% of most electorates. However, hearing the stories and seeing the evidence from voter rolls in Virginia and North Carolina; I can’t help but wonder whether any race with a margin less than 1% is being decided by voters rather than political litigators.

This year’s midterms may or may not be impacted by voter fraud. The time to prevent these sorts of things by striking names from voter rolls was Election Day minus 60. That would have been on, or about Labor Day. Given the narrow margins in recent polling, there will probably be 1 or 2 Senatorial or Gubernatorial races that will still be undecided at 3 AM Wednesday Morning.

To give the people confidence that registered, legally eligible voters decide close elections, two things need to take place. Voter ID needs to become the law of the law. State and Federal legislators need to cooperate and establish a national standard for who gets to be counted as an eligible voters. My recommendation would be an established resident of a US State or territory with verifiable citizenship. Make the standard for getting a legitimate ID that could be used as proof to vote the same, and our elections could be credibly fair – even if the margins are less 1% of the total votes cast.

*-And while they haven’t dug up the partisan affiliation of the 81 deceased voters, I’ll give you three guesses who they supported and the first two don’t count.

**-A part of me thinks 7% of the entire voter roll is an overestimate. Another part of me replies. “Give it up Jake, it’s Baltiless.”